[New Data] What Percentage of your Tweets Should be Links or Replies

If you like myth busting social media data like this, be sure to buy my newest book, Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness.

One of the social media questions I’m most interested in is about whether Twitter is best suited for conversation or broadcasting. To many people’s surprise, I generally find myself on the broadcast side, and most of the data I’ve analyzed seems to back me up.

Just yesterday, I started a little informal Twitter poll and found that respondents were pretty evenly split between broadcasting and conversation.

This time, I looked at more than 100k randomly chosen active Twitter accounts and their Tweets. I analyzed the percentage of their Tweets than contain a link as well as the percentage that began with an @. I also measured the percentage of their last 100 Tweets that were ReTweeted.

I found that accounts that had high link-percentages between 60% and 80% had the most ReTweets and accounts with low reply-percentages between 0% and 10% had the most ReTweets.

If you’re interested in ReTweets, broadcasting lots of interesting content works much better than “engaging in the conversation.”